Bones of Contention

A federal law stands between scientists and America's prehistoric past.

John J. Miller from the October 1997 issue

(Page 2 of 2)

The scientists would like the corps to take a longer view. "This is an incredibly important find," says Jantz, a plaintiff in the lawsuit. "There are maybe a dozen skeletons of this age that we know about. Each new discovery represents a significant increase in the amount of information available about the peopling of America."

Kennewick Man appears to challenge the conventional academic belief that North and South America were settled 10,000 years ago by Asian people crossing a land bridge between Siberia and Alaska. During the last Ice Age, sea levels were much lower than they are now, making such a passage possible. Yet the more scientists learn about ancient human migrations, the less predictable they become. Perhaps other types of people crossed this land bridge as well.

Archaeologists working in the Tarim Basin of western China recently uncovered more than 100 mummies that are several thousand years old. Many of these desiccated corpses are in such good condition that their fair skin and blonde hair is still visible. What were they doing in the middle of Asia? The Ainu people of Japan, a long-oppressed minority population, have an even more baffling heritage. Native to Japan before Mongoloid people settled on the island, they are known for their distinctly un-Japanese physical traits, such as light skin and wavy hair. In fact, they look a lot like Europeans. But nobody knows how to explain their presence so far away from Europe. Kennewick Man suggests that similar mysteries may lie hidden in the United States.

Other researchers are examining the possibility that some ancient Europeans made their way to the Americas the way the Vikings did before Columbus: by hopping from northern Europe to Iceland, to Greenland, and finally to Canada. The evidence for this is still highly conjectural. It hinges mainly on some intriguing technological similarities between ancient cultures in America and Europe.

Questions such as these won't be resolved if anthropologists and archaeologists cannot study ancient sites and remains found in the United States. And NAGPRA's vagueness about what constitutes a legitimate tribal claim gives federal agencies a license to disrupt that work. In the case of Kennewick Man, it's impossible for any modern tribe to demonstrate a connection with the remains, especially without further study. "Once you get beyond a certain age, it's extremely hard for a living tribe to make a claim," says University of Arizona geologist C. Vance Haynes Jr., who joined the lawsuit. The Army Corps of Engineers has simply assumed that since the bones are incredibly old, they must be related to tribes inhabiting the region today--as if nobody has moved in or out of the area for more than 9,000 years.

Kennewick Man is not the first case in which government regulations have prevented scientists from researching ancient finds. The Spirit Cave Mummy discovered in Nevada in 1940 was once thought to be only 2,000 years old because of its excellent preservation, but recent radiocarbon dating has suggested an age of 9,400 years. It, too, has several Caucasoid features. But earlier this year the Northern Paiute tribe claimed it under NAGPRA, and since then the Bureau of Land Management has prevented the Nevada State Museum from conducting genetics tests on the remains until it makes a ruling on ownership. Four years ago, a state law forced researchers to give a skeleton found near Buhl, Idaho, to the Shoshone-Bannock tribe for reburial. The remains may have had Caucasoid features and were dated at roughly 10,600 years, making them among the oldest ever found in the Americas. But little is known about them today, since they were quickly turned over to the tribe.

Robson Bonnichsen, director of the Center for the Study of the First Americans at Oregon State University and one of the plaintiffs in the Kennewick Man case, had a troubling run-in with NAGPRA several years ago. While investigating a Montana site that is at least 11,000 years old, he came across several strands of ancient human hair. When he went public with the find in 1993, two local tribes claimed the hair as the remains of their ancestors and demanded that Bonnichsen turn it over to them. The BLM prevented researchers from continuing their work at the site and barred them from analyzing the hair they had collected. Bonnichsen pleaded that there is a big difference between disturbing the buried remains of recent ancestors and studying hair that was almost certainly shed naturally very long ago. After a drawn-out battle, NAGPRA regulations were altered to allow the study of naturally shed hair, but Bonnichsen still has not received permission to conduct the chemical and genetic analysis he had planned.

NAGPRA comes at a particularly inopportune moment. Recent technological advances allow researchers to obtain revolutionary new insights about ancient people. In July, German geneticists determined through mitochondrial DNA analysis that Neanderthals are probably not ancestors of modern humans. Such infor-

mation would have been impossible to gather only a few years ago, and researchers would like to conduct similar experiments on Kennewick Man to learn more about his relationship to modern people. They would also like to reconfirm his age, obtain a more comprehensive set of skeletal measurements, and search for other clues about life in the past.

These sorts of investigation are routinely performed elsewhere, but the scientists' opponents would have the world believe that this is simply another morality play between treaty-breaking whites and reservation-bound Indians. "It comes down to racism," says Harjo. The implication is that whites would never think of exhuming the remains of their own ancestors. But nothing could be further from the truth. One plaintiff in the lawsuit, the Smithsonian Institution's Douglas Owsley, is studying bones recently discovered at Jamestown, England's first successful colony in North America. Other researchers have learned an enormous amount about prehistoric Europe by examining the 5,300-year-old "Ice Man" found in the Alps in 1991. Last year, a Danish museum sponsored a big exhibit of the so-called Bog People--corpses preserved in the peat swamps of northern Europe for thousands of years. If something like NAGPRA had applied to these remains, they would never have become important sources of information about the past. They would be in the ground, decomposing.

In July, the plaintiffs in the Kennewick Man standoff received some good news. A federal judge, finding that the Army Corps of Engineers had acted capriciously last year in its hasty decision to repatriate the bones, ordered the corps to reassess its decision. A few days later, Sen. Slade Gorton (R-Wash.) inserted language into an Appropriations Committee report saying that "it is in the public interest that information providing greater insight into American prehistory should be collected, preserved, and disseminated for the benefit of the country as a whole" and urging the corps to "act as an impartial party" in the dispute.

The tribes may still get Kennewick Man, but now a judge has imposed a tougher standard on their claim and some political pressure has come to bear on the corps. The bones still sit in a government vault, and the case is likely to grind on for at least a few more months. "I think Kennewick Man has been a good thing if only because it has focused so much attention on this problem," says Jantz. "It just has to have a happy ending."

Comments

nfl jerseys|11.16.10 @ 1:16AM|#

nxthfch

log in or register to reply

nfl jerseys|11.16.10 @ 1:17AM|#

mhtgb

log in or register to reply